Last year's launch of AMD's FX processors was honestly disappointing. The Bulldozer CPU cores that were bundled into each Zambezi chip were hardly power efficient and in many areas couldn't significantly outperform AMD's previous generation platform. Look beyond the direct AMD comparison and the situation looked even worse. In our conclusion to last year's FX-8150 review I wrote the following:

"Single threaded performance is my biggest concern, and compared to Sandy Bridge there's a good 40-50% advantage the i5 2500K enjoys over the FX-8150. My hope is that future derivatives of the FX processor (perhaps based on Piledriver) will boast much more aggressive Turbo Core frequencies, which would do wonders at eating into that advantage."

The performance advantage that Intel enjoyed at the time was beyond what could be erased by a single generation. To make matters worse, before AMD could rev Bulldozer, Intel already began shipping Ivy Bridge - a part that not only increased performance but decreased power consumption as well. It's been a rough road for AMD over these past few years, but you have to give credit where it's due: we haven't seen AMD executing this consistently in quite a while. As promised we've now had multiple generations of each platform ship from AMD. Brazos had a mild update, Llano paved the way for Trinity which is now shipping, and around a year after Zambezi's launch we have Vishera: the Piledriver based AMD FX successor.

At a high level, Vishera swaps out the Bulldozer cores from Zambezi and replaces them with Piledriver. This is the same CPU core that is used in Trinity, but it's optimized for a very different purpose here in Vishera. While Trinity had to worry about working nicely in a laptop, Vishera is strictly a high-end desktop/workstation part. There's no on-die graphics for starters. Clock speeds and TDPs are also up compared to Trinity.

CPU Specification Comparison

CPU

Manufacturing Process

Cores

Transistor Count

Die Size

AMD Vishera 8C

32nm

8

1.2B

315mm2

AMD Zambezi 8C

32nm

8

1.2B

315mm2

Intel Ivy Bridge 4C

22nm

4

1.4B

160mm2

Intel Sandy Bridge E (6C)

32nm

6

2.27B

435mm2

Intel Sandy Bridge E (4C)

32nm

4

1.27B

294mm2

Intel Sandy Bridge 4C

32nm

4

1.16B

216mm2

Intel Lynnfield 4C

45nm

4

774M

296mm2

Intel Sandy Bridge 2C (GT1)

32nm

2

504M

131mm2

Intel Sandy Bridge 2C (GT2)

32nm

2

624M

149mm2

Vishera is still built on the same 32nm GlobalFoundries SOI process as Zambezi, which means there isn't much room for additional architectural complexity without ballooning die area, and not a whole lot of hope for significantly decreasing power consumption. As a fabless semiconductor manufacturer, AMD is now at GF's mercy when it comes to moving process technology forward. It simply has to make 32nm work for now. Piledriver is a light evolution over Bulldozer, so there's actually no substantial increase in die area compared to the previous generation. Cache sizes remain the same as well, which keeps everything roughly the same. These chips are obviously much larger than Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge parts, but Intel has a full node advantage there which enables that.

The table above says it all. TDPs haven't changed, cache sizes haven't changed and neither have core counts. Across the board Vishera ships at higher base frequencies than the equivalent Zambezi part, but without increasing max turbo frequency (in the case of the 8-core parts). The 6 and 4 core versions get boosts to both sides, without increasing TDP. In our Trinity notebook review I called the new CPU core Bulldozed Tuned. The table above supports that characterization.

It's also important to note that AMD's pricing this time around is far more sensible. While the FX-8150 debuted at $245, the 8350 drops that price to $199 putting it around $40 less than the Core i5 3570K. The chart below shows where AMD expects all of these CPUs to do battle:

AMD's targets are similar to what they were last time: Intel's Core i5 and below. All of the FX processors remain unlocked and ship fully featured with hardware AES acceleration enabled. Most Socket-AM3+ motherboards on the market today should support the new parts with nothing more than a BIOS update. In fact, I used the same ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard I used last year (with a much newer BIOS) for today's review:

The Test

For more comparisons be sure to check out our performance database: Bench.

There are 8 fully pipelined integer cores in there, they are just very weak. Some of it is the shared frontend/decoder some of it is the integer execution units themselves. Weak SIMD/FPU-performance isn't the only thing it got. It just does so much less. You don't have two pipelines with separate resources to achieve SMT/HT. They need wider execution here. Preferably dropping the shared front end thing too. Makes no point of having it around, focus on making it faster and dump all that cache which does no good. Mobile/Notebook chips can't really have 16MB of cache any way. Just a few MB.Reply

Just kidding I have a i5 myself, But guys you really should stop being such fanboys. AMD has a great Chip here with the FX-8320 and FX-8350. They are priced much lower than the top i5 CPU, And they will perform just as well in gaming if not better. And who cares about it using 125 watts? 125 watts is a bit more than what Intel's i5's use , But it can still be ran more than fine with a High end GPU with just a decent 600watt mainstream PSU like a CX600. Reply

Intel i5's can handle faster memory than any amp chip. They have a stronger MC plus they OC very well too. With the 1155 socket the amd chips were barely keeping up. Since haswell the speed champs are intel cpu's hands down and with the z97 boards and the new processors that will only work with the 97 boards, look out amd! Better OC'ing and handling faster memory than before!Reply